A primary legal issue for the national libraries concerns legal deposit legislation, the requirement for publishers to deposit copies of their publications at the national library of the country in which they are published. In most nations, this legislation needs to be updated to include born-digital publications, which raise a host of new issues regarding copyright (digital publications can be distributed more readily and widely than physical publications) and preservation (long-term preservation of digital objects of necessity involves copying them, so digital rights management protections and laws limiting the making of copies for specific purposes inhibit digital preservation). The author cites the Library of Congress’s Section 108 Study Group, the report for which has since been released, as a sign of imminent progress for one nation on this issue.1 Although legal deposit legislation is not an issue I have had to grapple with, the question of what we have the right to copy and make available is relevant to all engaged in digital projects, so I appreciated the study’s inclusion of these legal questions.

The descriptions in the analysis of the organizational structures and funding streams of digital preservation activities in the national libraries, while not replicable by the rest of us, were nonetheless instructive. Verheul’s findings with respect to national libraries’ interdepartmental collaboration in the digital context, regardless of where digital activities are primarily positioned within the organizational structure, echo my experience in my own institution: these activities cross traditional boundaries of collections, technical services, information technology, and administration.

The survey inquired about each national library’s existing and planned digital repository systems, their design, development, implementation, and production, as well as the services performed by them, in terms of archiving and access. Special attention was paid to each repository’s adherence (or intention to adhere) to the Reference Model for Open Archival Information System (OAIS), a framework developed by the Council of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems that provides a common vocabulary for long-term preservation and access to digital objects in a repository.² This model remains a foundational document of the digital preservation community in 2008.

The libraries were also surveyed about which formats were ingested into their digital repositories, in which versions, with what metadata, and whether the digital file’s content alone or its “look and feel” should be preserved. Some libraries restricted ingest to specific storage formats in the hopes of forestalling the need to conduct format migration, and several had already employed migration as a preservation strategy. Policies differed on which versions to retain: Some considered only master preservation copies for long-term storage, while others created and stored a duplicate of the master file as well, and still others made room for access copies derived from the master or duplicate. Preservation metadata, which derives from administrative and technical metadata, were acknowledged as important in the survey analysis, but standards that were emerging at the time have been further developed; the PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies Working Group (PREMIS) released version 2.0 of its data dictionary in March 2008.³

The question of whether to focus on bit-level preservation of the digital file (preserving its content, which may not be renderable in future versions of hardware and software) versus the file’s context, structure, appearance, and behavior (preserving its “look and feel”) received special focus from Verheul, who, along with her employing institution, appears to be a proponent of emulation as a preservation strategy: as of 2004, only the KB among the national libraries had experimented with it, but its absence received frequent mention, indicating that it had been a survey question. Other strategies, such as distributed digital preservation (in which I am particularly interested), received only passing mention in the profiles of Denmark, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, so did not appear to have been included as a survey question.

Part 2 of the book, with its in-depth descriptions of the fifteen national libraries on all of the topics for which the responses had been summarized in part 1, is long past its shelf life and would have been irrelevant to many readers even if the information were current. Many of the R&D projects described in this section as forthcoming have already completed at least one phase and published their findings, and some organizations are no longer in existence, so links to their Web pages may not work (for example, the Research Libraries Group merged with the OCLC Online Computer Library Center in July 2006).

While I admired the thoroughness with which Verheul approached her research, I feel that busy librarians and archivists interested in this topic would make better use of their time by following electronic discussion lists and blogs, attending sessions on digital preservation at conferences, and taking the online Cornell Digital Preservation Management Tutorial or five-day workshop,⁴ as all are likely to provide considerably more up-to-date information.